I'm here at the beautiful Kentucky Horse Park (KHP) in Lexington, Kentucky, for my third Arabian Sporthorse National (affectionately known as SHN)--although it is the seventh anniversary of the event splitting off from US Nationals to give sport horses a chance to shine all on their own.
This year is the first that SHN has been held at the KHP, and boy are the gums flapping about the facility! Walking around the park, you'll pass one group oohing and aahing about how beautiful it is and how wonderful the footing is, and the next group you pass will be complaining about the construction. It leads one to wonder: was this a good move?
I can't and won't pretend to know all the ins and outs of the decision to move SHN to KHP (aren't acronyms fun? Let's throw in AHA, USEF, USDF and SNAFU while we're at it), but I can tell you a little about the facility and compare it to the one in Nampa, Idaho.
The biggest complaint I've heard so far is that there is construction everywhere and the facility is not finished. Many people knew this before we came and were prepared for it, others weren't. It's fairly safe unless your horse spooks and goes running backward toward a ditch full of big rocks (as happened to one poor girl Tuesday night), but as long as you plan for it, you can get around it fairly well and deal with it. Remember, folks, the construction has to happen if the KHP is to be ready for the Alltech World Equestrian Games next year, and how uber-cool will that be? Once it's done, this facility will be just fantastic.
Weather
I think there are a goodly number of states where locals like to make the joke, "Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes and it will change!" That is certainly the case here. This morning, I woke up to a perfectly blue sky, and perhaps two hours later a big black storm cloud rolled in and blessed us with yet more rain. Ten minutes later, it was gone. It has been raining off and on all week, including a real doozy of a shower (if you can call it that) on Tuesday. There was so much water coming down that when I was sitting in the covered arena (which is so big, I kept thinking it was the "indoor", but it's not), I couldn't see anything outside.
There are two things about the rain in Kentucky that make it downright bearable: the showers last for maybe 10 minutes and then end as quickly as they started, and it's warm. OK, it's humid too, but it's 75 and humid, as opposed to 108 and humid as it sometimes is back home (Sacramento, California). Despite the constant wet everywhere, I've been walking around in t-shirts with short sleeves, perfectly comfortable. Even if I get wet from said rain showers or the numerous baths I give per day, I don't feel too uncomfortable.
Contrast to Nampa: it's cold there. It's really quite cold. Maybe not Alaska in December cold, but it's plenty cold enough to make me whine about it, and no one wants that. On top of that, KHP is designed for the rain, and Nampa is not. In Nampa, we arrived at about 9:00 at night in a pelting rain storm and had to put our horses in flooded stalls. There was almost no overhang on the portable stalls, so there was nowhere to stand or work out of the rain except for in a stall.
At KHP, most of the stalls (probably all, but I haven't seen them all because there are so many) there is a big enough overhang in front of the stalls that water doesn't seem to go in unless there's wind driving it in, which I have not witnessed yet. The overhang is also big enough to keep you fairly dry when you walk along in front of the stalls, cleaning, feeding, cleaning, bragging about your latest ride, complaining about the judges, etc.
The downside is that there is a cement ditch that runs in front of our stalls (I don't think it's in front of all of them, but our row anyway), and the horses have to take a big step to get over it. Of course, they all had to jump it the first couple of times, which had my heart in my throat that Precious would get a boo boo in the process, but miraculously they have all figured it out and are able to step over with a minimum of drama on their part or mine. The upside of the ditch, of course, is that it keeps the stalls and roads from flooding!
In addition to the barns, the arenas are also built for rain. A couple of them drain quite nicely, although some have standing water in them all the time. The brilliant thing, though, is the footing. I heard the park spent $1million on footing this year-a darned good investment, because even when there's standing water, the footing is not slippery and is safe to longe in. You also don't sink very far, so your designer jeans only get wet and muddy on the very bottom.
Layout
Nampa and KHP have one thing in common: they're spread out. Really spread out. Like, you really, really need a golf cart to get around or it will take you days to get from ring one to the indoor arena/coliseum. The KHP, which sits on 1200 acres, is so mind-bogglingly big that I haven't seen a quarter of it. It can accommodate more horses than any facility we've been in so far.
Tourism
National Championships are a great time to introduce people to the breed. Getting new people to stop by the show and watch is always a challenge, but let's look at the difference in tourism between Nampa, Idaho and Lexington, Kentucky. OK, I don't have actual figures, but who goes to Nampa on vacation? Horse lovers from all over the world travel to Kentucky to see the sites, and the KHP is one of them. Why not stop by the show while they're there?
Then there's something for the horse show crowd to do when they aren't showing...in Nampa? Good luck! Lexington? Well, there's the KHP to explore, the Keeneland sales, farm tours, various museums, bourbon factory tours, etc, etc, etc. There's so much to do and see that there is no way you can fit it all in in a week. Plus, there are some really great restaurants here.
That's all I have for tonight. In summary: I like KHP. I want to come back to KHP again and again. I'll be posting daily to share my experiences and maybe talk to a few friends about theirs, so y'all come back now, y'hear?